KurzfassungAbstractWe introduce the notion of an ontology excerpt as being a fixed-size subset of an ontology that preserves as much knowledge as possible about the terms in a given vocabulary as described in the ontology. We consider different extraction techniques for ontology excerpts based on methods from Information Retrieval. To evaluate these techniques, we measure the degree of incompleteness of the resulting excerpts using the notion of logical difference. We provide an experimental evaluation of the extraction techniques by applying them on the biomedical ontology SNOMED CT.